Sonic Xtreme Saturn 718 Hacking and Modding
By DaGuAr And Andrew75

Ok So yeah guys, Making this here topic to help DaGuar and I to keep track of our Sonic X-treme 718 demo Hacking exploits. (can I even call it hacking? Maybe!)
Feel free to give advise! DaGuAr got me up and running with a nice little workflow using Hex workshop, TakCheck ( A Sega Saturn data viewer program) and how to set up files for viewing in Photoshop. The help was a godsend Since I don't really have much of a hacking background and I didn't really know where to start.

The 718 Build had been leaked several years ago, And has been explored by SaNik and years later JollyRoger. SaNik had given JR some notes about extracting the model data which produced some nice some results, JR had also tinkered around for awhile with other aspects of the build.
Even though these 2 god like beings have gone threw the code, I don't think they went threw all the data with a fine toothed comb due to time constraints. And if they had, than what they discovered is lost to the sands of time.
Ok so this brings us to our purpose, which is to try and track down Assets that we have not seen before. (Textures and Models ect)
We are doing this threw process of elimination. (for example by first tracking down data clusters and selecting all data of that cluster and than change all data to black in PS, or all 00 in Hex. This allows us to see the changes if running the Game, and or threw TakCheck Dos program)

First We extracted the 0 and 1 files from the 718 Bin (or ISO File) and than DaGuAr showed me how to view 0 file by loading it up as a .raw file in Plotoshop. After saving out changes we did in Photoshop or Hex Wokshop we can renamed the 0 File to 0.bin so that it can be loaded into a viewing program called TakCheck which runs in DOS.
TakCheck can view the raw data as an image. But what sucks is that you really don't know where to find the pallet data that corresponds with a section of texture data. 1 byte off and you have wrong colors, and there are 786,432 bytes in the file. 1 byte is equal to 1 pixel. and you have a lot of greyscale images crushed together. and no way to know where one ends and the next begins, same goes for palettes. where does the palette begin or end ?!
there are a lot of images inside of the 0 file.

Ok so how do we view the 0 file in Photoshop?
First go into the properties of the 0 file and look at how many Bytes the file has (make note of this). And than change the 0 file's extinction to .raw so we end up with 0.raw.
Next Drag the file over to photoshop, A window will pop up and you can now enter the dimensions in pixels.. but wait ! How do we know the Dimensions ?!
Heres how: first decide what width you want, be it 64, 128, or even 8, (it's good to keep in mind that a power of 2 is usually best)
Ok so the size for the 0 file is 786,432 bytes. Divide that into 64 parts and you get 12288 so the height will be 12288

I think JollyRoger may have found the Hill height Data before. And when I think back, I didn't remember what section of data that he showed at the time.
Anyways, While Experimenting around I rediscovered the Data that corresponds to the height map which produces the hills. I changed the section to all black which makes the ground flat.
But there are small hills remaining which have animation, so I'll try and track them down next. I also found the portion of data which assigns texture layout to the ground plane.
and by changing it to all black we can see what texture is assigned to black.

Flat ground with micro animated bumps remaining, also note the texture change to X-treme logo.
Seems that the Item placement on the ground adjusts to the new ground height. Pretty cool stuff Christina Coffen set up here!

DaGuAr created this image when explaning how things should work.

Here we have the Palette and under it the tiles. Lucky for us we knew where this palette was located so we pasted it at the top of this saved out data chunk, So that we could just enter 1 in TakCheck that wants the Palette staring location.
The pallets we found so far are 512 bytes long. not sure if there are shorter palettes.

The program TakCheck allows you to rearrange into 8 x 8 chunks by pressing B

1 Byte ( or pixel over for the palette starting position and you get nasty shit)

DaGuAr swapped the Crystal shaped object that launches Sonic into the air for Nack/Fang's head today, Seems that its quite easy to do by swapping the first 20 bytes of the any model's Attach byte Structure with the Crystal's attach byte structure.
The lighting is kind of on the dull side here, I hope we can find how to controle that. A lot more happened today in regards to learning new things about the data, but I'm really out of energy from lack of sleep, so I don't think i'll be posting about that.
We can also look up the true polygon shading colors by using an emulator's VDP1 texture viewing tools, this will help Project AXSX quite a bit!.

However, now that you are revealing some progress, perhaps I should reveal some new news with some recent findings of mine for StF soon! />/>/>

Yeah that'd be interesting , also DaGuAr is hacking this more skillful than I am, I'm learning from him as we go. he cant post here so I'm doing it for both of us. If i remember correctly, he's done some stuff with Jam and Fighters In the past too. And yeah I'll keep an eye on that old topic cause I loves me some 32 bit treasure.

Knucklez, on 17 June 2017 - 02:51 PM, said:

Dude, you really can't get enough of Xtreme. I mean you really freaking love this. Keep it up Andrew />/>

If i remember correctly, he's done some stuff with Jam and Fighters In the past too

I have never heard of anyone else besides Tiberious who has done work on Fighters before! Can you figure out what he did, if he did anything?

OOps , it was a long time ago and sometimes I cant recall all the details so far back, I thought that he did something , but yeah speaking with him today, he says that he only used some 3D rippers with emulators in regards to Fighters. Sorry to give the wrong info. >__<

...he says that he only used some 3D rippers with emulators in regards to Fighters..

Sigh... seen this too many times over the years. People want the models so they use directx rippers, however only the textures are rendered using DirectX, which is why no one can get model data. Oh well...

Maybe dumb question, but is there a possibility the whole Nack and Metal Sonic stages are still in there just non-activated? Or is it appearing it' s just left over assets.

Or do you even know at this point />/>/>/>

Edit: nm, I see in the AXSX thread you think there's a high possibility. Guess it's really anyone's guess until someone with the skill goes in there.

Well Damn I skipped right over this post ! Crap !
Anyways yeah after going threw the data togeather with DaGuAr, and we are still going threw it BTW ! There is a high probability that we can at least get ahold of some more unseen textures and or assets. but I think most of the data inside the 0 file had already been seen while playing the game.
( So that data has been crossed out and documented, which narrows unsearched data areas down)
We also know that most of the tiles are compressed. It very well may be using PRS format. http://segaretro.org...26redirect%3Dno
Sadly, we don't Know how to decompress them at the moment. Also in regards to Metal Sonic being in this build , The more we look the more doubtful that possibility. But who knows!